Read more!

The
brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities – the
building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many
places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control,
resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did,
however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was
pretty new and “worked great.”

Unfortunately,
everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set
up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month
just to run the stove and range.

“It’s like
$10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you
use it,” she explained.

Yeah,
I’m just not going to do that, then, I thought,
doing the math in my head.

At that
point, $30 was just a little bit less than my take-home after a day of making
lattes, which is what I was doing every day that I wasn’t at my public radio
internship. The rent on the apartment – which was the
least expensive I could find in Seattle – was already going to cost
well more than half of my monthly income. With student loan payments to top it
off, I barely had living expenses to speak of, and the extra money I’d spend on
the gas just didn’t seem worth it.

This wasn’t my first go-round with
poverty: We grew up without much money, and I supported myself
through college. But after graduation – when the student loan envelopes started
showing up and I had to move out of my inexpensive college town to a city that
actually had jobs – the situation was dire. But I knew how to handle it.

I moonlit
as a cocktail waitress. I considered selling plasma (again), but the bus
ride to the clinic was too long to fit into my days. I didn’t have a
car or health care (or a stove). I picked up odd jobs on Craigslist,
receiving cash under the table for nights of cocktailing or working as a cater
waiter. I visited food banks. I never bought clothing. I stopped shaving
to save money on razors.

Eventually,
I was able to get a slightly more lucrative job, began piling on freelance
work, and basically never looked back.

I am very,
very confident that I did everything in my power to provide myself the best
life possible as a young adult, and that the choices I made were the correct
choices. My life now would indicate that that’s the case. And still, without
fail, when I tell someone or write about that time in my life, I’m met with a
cascade of advice.

Well-meaning people who have never been poor are convinced
that they know what I should have done. That subtle tweaks to my budget could
somehow stretch my $9.50 per hour. I should have gotten a roommate. I should
have lived somewhere cheaper. I should have found a better job.

Anyone
who’s ever lived in poverty has probably had this experience.

In the US,
we have become so accepting of the fact that poverty is not a symptom of a
grossly unequal economy, or the result of numerous systemic failures, or the
product of years of trickle-down economics, but instead, that the only thing
standing between a poor person and the life of their dreams is their own decisions,
their own choices, and their own failures.

This is
why I would advise any person whose immediate reaction upon hearing about
a friend, relative, or stranger on the Internet who is living in poverty is to
offer unsolicited advice to hold their tongue (or fingers), at least long
enough to consider what other forces contribute to poverty and how their “help”
may actually be insulting, incorrect, and downright damaging.

The most common advice doesn't add up.

The
over-simplification of poverty is often apparent in the advice that gets
disseminated by people who have money and companies who make money off of other
people’s financial predicaments.

Earlier
this year, an infographic circled
around which underscored this fact. Created by a company
called InvestmentZen, the infographic showed how to “build
wealth on the minimum wage.”

Aside from
the fact that it contained numerous logistical issues – it used the federal
minimum wage, which isn’t accurate in most states, either because their wage is
higher or lower due to tip-crediting – the graphic also seemed to be concerned
about moralizing the decisions of poor people and less about actually helping
anyone.

Advice
from the graphic included “learning skills on YouTube,” only eating in-season
produce, and remembering that “the best things in life are free.”

“You can make excuses, or you can do something about it,”
the graphic chided. “It’s your choice to make.”

Twitter instantly took it to task;
the response was so heated that it eventually led one of the men responsible
for circulating to issue a retraction, calling many of the criticisms “fair.”

I suspect
that the graphic was so easily mocked because the advice it selected was
familiar. Despite the myriad systemic reasons that many people live in
poverty, there are a handful of “tips” that well-meaning (most of the time)
folks recycle with alarming regularity.

Move
somewhere cheaper. Buy in bulk. Get rid of your car. Get a roommate. Eat out
less.

These
changes seem simple – if you just spent less money on groceries, you’d
have more money! If you didn’t have a car, you could save hundreds on car
insurance! – but they fail to take into account one crucial
element of humanity and existence: The dollar amount of a thing
doesn’t fully capture the value of it.

Most
people who live in poverty are working jobs where their income is determined by
how many hours they can spend on the job, which often don’t fall within
typical commuting hours, and often run well over forty hours per week.

When
you’re poor, your time – especially your free time – is extremely precious. And
many of the prescribed tips for saving money cut into that free time, make it
less enjoyable, or might even actively cost more money in the short term.

I’ve written before about the actual
cost of moving – renting a truck, putting down a deposit, the
financial hit of taking time off work to move – but recommending that someone
relocate their entire life to save on rent also neglects to account for the
real value of living in a place with a support system.

Whether
it’s a family by birth or by choice, living near people you know offers a sense
of responsibility and place – not to mention a couch to crash on if you get
evicted and the potential for free childcare or other assistance.

To
illustrate this point, let’s use another common tip: giving up a car.

Which
means that the cost (both figurative and literal) of giving up a car might be
steeper than keeping it. Which means that even if a person makes the
choice to save money by riding the bus, the bus may not be there for them.

We can
look at it like this: Estimated cost of owning a car over a year: about $725 per month, according to
AAA. That’s a lot, but compared to riding the bus (because let’s
assume a person doesn’t have the upfront cash for a bike, a lock, and the gear
they might need to commute in all weather), it’s not really.

Where I
live, it costs about $5 per day to commute via bus, assuming I’m traveling
inside the city and just going to work and back using a single method of
transit. Multiply that by five days per week (though most people working
minimum wage work more than that), and it’s about $100 per month. That’s still
less than $725 – until you account for:

Two hours of
commuting compared to thirty minutes of commuting (at $13/hour): $19.50/day in
lost income, or $390 per month.

Cost of an extra
hour of childcare to account for the commute time (at $13/hour, as well): $260 per month

The cost of using
the bus for weekly grocery trips (which limit the choices a person has
and reduces the ability to buy in bulk, another favorite piece of advice
for people with means to give to poor people) and the occasional other
appointment: about $50 per month.

Which
equals $800 – and doesn’t take into account the fact that grocery shopping by bus
is not ideal for someone with kids in tow. Additionally, taking the bus to
get groceries makes it less likely that a person can comparison shop,
visit multiple stores for ultimate savings, and purchase products that are less
easy to carry, like fresh produce or bulk items.

You can also see from this example how interconnected so
many of these pieces of advice are.

“Get rid
of your car” is a fine piece of advice in a vacuum, but when it’s coupled with
“drive for Uber to make extra money,” you’ve now prescribed something
that’s literally impossible. “Spend less on groceries” is fine on its own, but
if you’re also recommending that someone switch to commuting by bike or bus and
move to a less dense place with fewer food choices, you’ve now quadrupled the daily
difficulty of their life.

And that
has a real cost, even if it’s not tangible or numeric.

This, I
think, is truly at the heart of the advice we tend to offer poor people: It
implicitly says that we believe that they should be willing and able to exchange
their own time on earth, comfort, happiness, and even physical health and
safety just to scrape by.

Being poor is really expensive.

The
assumption that “simple advice” can dramatically change a person’s economic
outlook assumes that a person’s poverty is solely the result of personal
failings, rather than very real and costly systems of oppression, including
legacy poverty, systemic racism, mass incarceration, punitive immigration
policies, medical debt, and more.

Regardless of the personal choices a family might make to
save money, there are some unavoidable costs that are baked into our financial
and social systems.

Overdraft
fees, late fees on missed bills, high-interest credit card fees, and payday
lenders are just a few ways that poverty begets higher expenses. The average
payday loan borrower – who is usually short just a few hundred dollars between
paychecks – ends up paying more than 300%
interest on their initial amount.

These
companies make billions each year by offering people a necessary service that
costs them an outrageously inflated price.

Banks also
find ways to capitalize on people without money. Many checking accounts require
that a person carry a minimum balance – and fine customers for every month that
they don’t meet the requirement. And that’s assuming a person even uses a
bank! An estimated 8% of Americans don’t
use a bank, largely due to their low monthly income. As a result, they pay more
money in fees at check cashing businesses or by using prepaid debit cards.

In
addition to these fees and fines, a lack of funds in-hand can also mean paying
more for services and products. Whether it’s putting charges on a credit card
and paying interest or buying in smaller denominations (and thus paying more
per unit), there are hundreds of small ways that being cash-poor can make
it harder to save.

The Washington Post reported
on a study on this subject: When [researchers] compared households with similar
consumption rates shopping at comparable stores – and controlling for two-ply
TP – they found that the poor were less likely than wealthier households to buy
bigger packages, or to time their purchases to take advantage of sales. By
failing to do so, they paid about 5.9% more per sheet of toilet paper – a
little less than what they saved by buying cheaper brands in the first place
(8.8%).

Poor folks don’t buy single-use items because they never
thought about buying in bulk – it’s often because they literally don’t have the
money to do so, or don’t have a way to get bulk items home.

Our broken
immigration system is also responsible for trapping new Americans (and
their children) in low-income jobs, substandard housing, and legitimately
dangerous transportation and work situations – all of which have a compounding
effect on poverty.

Each year,
immigrants pay billions into our tax coffers, only to get the short end of the
economic stick.

And if you
want to begin the process of obtaining citizenship? Expect to cough it up.
Just becoming a US citizen can cost up to $900.

Mass
incarceration also has a stark economic impact, specifically on the Black
community – a population that already sees lower lifetime earnings and
increased rates and instances of poverty.

One in four Black children born
in the era of mass incarceration will have a parent who is incarcerated,
which will limit that parent’s earning by an average of 40% over their
lifetime. The cycle of incarceration is expensive at every single step –
from the cost of arrests, legal fees, and fines, parole, and lost jobs and
hours on the clock, evictions, and so much more – and effectively traps people in a feedback loop of
poverty that’s nearly impossible to break.

Even those
who aren’t themselves incarcerated pay for incarceration, though. The
cost of visiting a spouse in prison (both in lost time and expenses),
inflated commissary bills, prohibitively expensive phone bills,
the cost of lost time due to traveling, court dates, and
meetings, and legal fees make it impossible for some families to dig out.

The InvestmentZen infographic was
roundly mocked because it was a symptom of a larger problem, which is that
people with means love to give advice to poor people. This serves two distinct
purposes:

It
makes people with means feel better about their means because they feel
like they have wealth as a direct result of their own effort – and not systems
and structures that helped them along the way; and

It
makes people with means feel better about those systems, rather than being
forced to confront them or work to dismantle them.

When
the infographic said that a person “can’t earn minimum wage and live
in an expensive city and be wealthy,” they weren’t telling a lie – but they
were accepting implicitly that it’s okay for people who work full-time to live
in poverty if they live in large cities.

Imagine if
everyone took that advice – if every person working minimum wage up and fled
all of the major cities to go live and work in smaller markets with less
expensive rent. Cities literally could not function.

Despite
the commonly held belief that only teens should or do work for the minimum
wage, the fact of the matter is that millions of Americans of
all ages, a/genders, and educational levelssupport their families on hourly
low-wage jobs. That includes seniors, disabled people, and women of color.

The answer, then, is not that poor people live differently,
but instead, that we create a society and an economy where people who work full
time can live in the community where they work.

No amount
of cutting back on luxury spending or driving extra hours
for Uber can change the fact that there is literally nowhere in the country where
a minimum wage job can support a family, that good union jobs have been in
decline for decades, or that housing costs have priced people out of their
homes. Cutting coupons, commuting by bike, and enjoying outdoor activities can’t
really fix that.

So,
instead of telling poor people what they should do to work around a system
that’s leaving more and more people behind every year, we need to consider how
the system can bend and change to better fit the needs of all people.